Aspects of the present invention relate to World Wide Web. Other aspects of the present invention relate to displaying content in a web browser.
World Wide Web has offered, since its creation, an effective means to share information. Information can be stored at a web server and can be located via a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) address. Information stored at any web server that is identifiable with a URL address can be accessed or retrieved via a web browser. Such a web browser is essentially an engine running on the World Wide Web with the capability of connecting to a web server identifiable with a URL address, receiving information from the web server, and rendering received information in a Graphical User Interface (GUI). With a web browser, information across the globe is simply one click away.
To facilitate web browsing, information stored on a web server is organized into web pages. A web page is essentially an electronic document that ties different pieces of information together on a single screen page. Such document may be a conventional text document or a multimedia document that incorporates information of different media such as text, audio, and visual information. Web pages are often constructed using some agreed protocols or languages. Such languages include HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and eXtensible Markup Language (XML). Using such languages, different pieces of information may be tied together in flexible ways to form a single web page. For example, HTML provides the capability of tagging different piece of information. It also provides the capability to visually arrange different pieces of information. For instance, a company logo (which may be an image icon) may be specified in an HTML document to be placed at the upper left corner of a web page with certain offset margins from the top and the left sides of the page.
Conventionally, when a web browser downloads information from a web server, it downloads web pages. The smallest unit of downloading corresponds to an entire web page. Once a web page is downloaded, the browser simply displays what is in the web page. That is, the web browser does not have the authority to manipulate a web page. For example, a web browser downloads and displays a web page containing a list of stock information. The list of stocks is sorted according to the alphabetic order of the stock symbols and each line in the list corresponds to a single stock (e.g., the stock symbol, its current price, its highest price in 52 weeks, its lowest price in 52 weeks, etc.). The web browser can not re-arrange the list in the web page (e.g., sort the stocks in an descending order of its current price). Neither can a user change the feel and look of the web page. In addition, a user can not select some of the stocks from the list to, for example, print or generate a customized stock information list.
A different aspect associated with current web browsing is that a web browser can not dynamically update part of a web page that has been changed since it is downloaded. When the content of a web page is updated, it is updated at the web server where the web page is stored. The update (no matter how small it is) yields an entire new web page. Any update to a displayed web page in a browser can only be achieved by downloading the entire new web page and re-display it. When there is only minor changes to a web page, the bandwidth used to download the entire new web page is not effectively used.